As the search for missing Nova Scotia siblings Lilly Sullivan, 6, and Jack Sullivan, 4, stretches into its seventh month, chilling accounts from their step-siblings reveal a pattern of targeted cruelty in the months before their May 2, 2025 disappearance. Central to the testimony: 5-year-old Lilly being locked in the cold, unfinished basement laundry room overnight as punishment for wetting the bed, and 3-year-old Jack forced to eat plain oatmeal in the unheated garage while the rest of the family dined inside.

The revelations come from Daniel Martell’s three biological children—Mia (15), Noah (12), and Emma (10)—who lived in the Lansdowne Station home on Gairloch Road with stepmother Malehya Brooks-Murray, 29, and the Sullivan children. In sworn statements to Nova Scotia Child Protection Services and RCMP investigators, the siblings described a home where love was conditional and punishment was public.

“Lilly cried so quiet you could barely hear,” Mia told a social worker in June 2025. “Daddy said big girls don’t wet the bed. So he’d carry her downstairs after dark, lock the laundry room door, and turn off the light. No blanket. No night-light. Just the washer humming.”

The basement, accessed via a narrow wooden staircase, was unfinished—concrete floor, exposed pipes, a single bare bulb. A child-sized mattress, stained and without sheets, sat beside a utility sink. Investigators found the door equipped with a sliding bolt on the outside—installed, Daniel claimed, “for storage security.” A faint outline of Lilly’s name, scratched into the drywall with a fingernail, was visible near the mattress.

Jack’s punishment was equally isolating. “He had to eat in the garage because he ‘didn’t behave at the table,’” Noah recalled. “Oatmeal, no milk, no sugar. While we had chicken and potatoes inside.” The garage—uninsulated, with a concrete floor and a single flickering fluorescent tube—dropped to near-freezing on spring nights. Jack, barely potty-trained, often ate in his dinosaur pajamas, shivering as the family’s laughter drifted through the connecting door.

Emma, then 9, added: “I’d sneak him a cookie sometimes when Daddy wasn’t looking. But if he got caught, Jack went to the garage again.”

The pattern began in late 2024, escalating after Lilly started kindergarten and Jack entered preschool. Daniel, 32, a laid-off oil rig worker, told Brooks-Murray the punishments were “tough love” to prepare them for “the real world.” Text messages recovered from her phone show her replying, “Okay, handle it,” after Daniel sent photos of Lilly crying in the laundry room at 11:07 p.m.

The step-siblings were not just witnesses—they were enforcers by fear. “We had to sit on the stairs and watch,” Mia said. “If we tried to help, Daddy said we’d sleep in the garage too.” Noah drew pictures of the scenes—Lilly curled on the mattress, Jack alone with a bowl—hidden under his bedroom floorboard. Emma wet the bed herself for weeks, terrified of the basement.

The final documented incident occurred April 29, 2025—three days before the disappearance. Daniel texted Brooks-Murray at work: “Lilly wet again. Basement tonight. Jack spilled juice—garage dinner.” A neighbor’s Ring camera captured faint crying from the house at 9:42 p.m. By morning, both children were gone.

RCMP searched the basement and garage on May 4. They found:

A child’s handprint in dried oatmeal on the garage floor (DNA: Jack Sullivan)
Urine stains on the basement mattress (DNA: Lilly Sullivan)
A broken crayon under the washer—Lilly’s favorite purple
The exterior bolt lock, still functional

Daniel Martell, detained briefly then released on conditions, told police the children “exaggerated” and that the basement was “temporary time-out.” He claimed the garage meals were “to teach gratitude.” Brooks-Murray, in a tearful CP interview, said she “trusted Daniel’s judgment” and was “too exhausted” from night shifts to question it.

The disappearance itself remains unsolved. The children were last seen alive on Dollarama footage May 1. No footprints led from the garage or basement to the woods. The backyard—bordered by dense forest, a ravine, and a swollen creek—yielded only a pink boot and unicorn plush, both negative for DNA.

Daniel’s children now live with their paternal grandmother in Truro. Mia refuses contact with her father. Noah plays hockey but wakes from nightmares of the laundry room door. Emma sleeps with a night-light shaped like a unicorn—“for Lilly.”

Child welfare experts call the case a textbook example of “differential treatment” in blended families. Dr. Peter Jaffe, co-director of the Centre for Research on Violence Against Women & Children, says: “When some children are scapegoated, others learn silence is survival. These step-siblings’ disclosures are heroic—but late.”

As of November 14, 2025, the $150,000 Crime Stoppers reward stands. RCMP continue weekly searches. Brooks-Murray posts daily on a verified page: “Lilly hated the dark. Jack hated being cold. Someone knows where they are.”

The garage and basement have been sealed as evidence. The oatmeal bowl—plastic, dinosaur-print—sits in an RCMP locker. The mattress is bagged, tagged, waiting.

Five children once shared a home. Three spoke. Two vanished. And in the silence of a locked laundry room and an empty garage, a province still listens for footsteps that never came.

Anyone with information: Nova Scotia RCMP 1-902-490-5020 or Crime Stoppers 1-800-222-TIPS.